Preface to the Second Edition
In the years since this book was originally published in 2020 I have come across various additional examples of early thought about—and experimentation with—self-reproducing machines. While most of these are fairly minor or peripheral supplements to the history of the subject, there are three contributions which I thought were more significant and therefore warranted an update to the history as set out in the first edition of the book. These contributions are from the German-born, nineteenth century inventor and utopian John Adolphus Etzler in the 1820s–1840s, the Hungarian author and satirist Frigyes Karinthy in 1916, and the U.S. mathematician and computer scientist Fred Stahl in 1960.
The editor of the original edition of our book at Springer, Ronan Nugent, has now moved to a different role within the company. After discussion with him we decided that the best way forward would be to publish an afterword in a relevant journal rather than producing an official second Springer edition of the book. Taking this advice, I wrote an afterword covering the newly-found material and was delighted to have it published in the thirtieth anniversary edition of the Artificial Life journal in early 2024 (T. Taylor, 2024).
Although the afterword was now published, it felt a little isolated from the original book. I therefore decided to produce a new author-formatted version of the book that included the afterword. To respect the original publication agreement with Springer I have kept the text of the main content of the book (Chaps. 1–7) unaltered, and added the afterword as a new chapter (Chap. 8). To provide some modest integration of the afterword with the main text I have added margin notes in the main text to alert the reader to sections where there is relevant additional material in the afterword.
While not as pleasing as fully integrating the new material into the main text of the book, this approach was the most practical within the confines of the Springer publication agreement, and it achieves the goal of bringing all original and new material together in a single volume.
For the reasons stated above, this second edition is therefore only available in the author-formatted version of the book that you are currently reading; there is (at least at the time of writing) no Springer version of this second edition.
Tim Taylor
Edinburgh
August 2024